


Some Words on Memory (The Chromatic Aberration Remix)

by wei



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-24
Updated: 2011-04-24
Packaged: 2017-10-18 14:29:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wei/pseuds/wei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hyuga Hinata on old clans, politics, and war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Words on Memory (The Chromatic Aberration Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Some Words on Memory](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/3129) by nthcoincident. 



At Hinata’s inauguration ceremony as Hyuga head, she promised to “uphold our family’s honor into the future.” If any of her relatives interpreted it as a critique of her father’s promise to “guard our family’s legacy,” none gave any sign. The ceremony itself was simple and comforting in its predictability – Hinata had studied the script passed down from generations past until she could recite it in her sleep. The one variable was where she summarized her vision for her tenure as the Hyuga head, and here, she focused on her father, for once meeting and holding his eyes. She could tell he was proud of her: proud of the way she laid hold of a confidence she did not feel she deserved, proud of the way her voice did not tremble, and proud of the way she accepted her position at long last.

Afterwards, she overheard her aunt remark to her father on how young she was, and how it seemed like only yesterday that she was a child watching from the shadows. “Fifteen was the traditional age of majority,” her father replied, and her aunt murmured her assent, never mind that no head had been inaugurated at fifteen in over a hundred years.

Hinata smiled, knowing her father would see. She was still watching and learning from the shadows, but she wasn’t always only in the shadows, so she could accept that.

She retreated to the gardens after the reception had dwindled down, and Uchiha Shisui appeared next to her. “First Itachi and now you. I need to be careful not to appear too respectable, or they’ll shackle me to a desk too,” he said.

“You are too valuable in the field,” she could have said, or “I learned from watching you and Itachi,” but instead she marveled at how even as an inadequate child, she had been gifted to be able to stand next to legends in the making and said, “Thank you for believing in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself.”

At age twelve and outshone by her younger sister, Hinata had felt nothing like her father’s daughter, much less like the Hyuga heiress. The only skill she would profess mastery of was the ability to be unobtrusive, which was a shameful a manifestation of who she was. This, she only laid claim to because even in the all-seeing Hyuga clan it netted her the whispers from her relatives about accidental deaths and her marriage contract to Shisui being tied to the position of heiress and not Hinata herself, and she knew that they’d never had spoken if they knew she could hear. It was her father’s steadfast commitment to primogeniture that had finally quieted the whispers – even as it made her feel even more undeserving.

She holed up in the library on the days when she wanted to hide from the disappointment in her father’s eyes and the hatred in her cousin’s. Her father would approve of that pursuit at least, for the same reason that she knew she did not have to worry about her cousin’s sudden appearance – in the library she would find the centuries of history and tradition and hidden there she hoped, the essence of what made them Hyuga. Like all old, proud families, they kept their genealogies there, as ordered and clear as they could make it but which still meant a spider web tangle to capture and keep hold of the Byakugan genes instead of an orderly tree.

Hinata had once looked for the place where the Uchiha branched off, failed to find it, and hadn’t been surprised. Genetic mutation in an ancillary line had little to do with the Hyuga pursuit of perfection. As a child, she thought she had little to do with it either. It was confounding that no one ever realized what was so obvious to her growing up: her family doubted her ability to lead the clan, doubted that she deserved it, doubted even that she would eventually lead the clan and not be displaced, but they never seemed to doubt that the position was hers by right – even as she was convinced she was some sort of mistake.

During her first chuunin exam, she suffered through the most disheartening and humiliating defeat she had ever had, but during her time in the hospital, it was as if her life had come sharply into focus. The child she had been was unworthy to be a Hyuga, and yet her father had traded his beloved brother’s life for hers. Even she could understand the symbolism in that disastrous affair: her uncle dead because of her, days after the celebration of her birthday. She was still heiress, even with a sister and cousin with far superior fighting ability, and even with a father who had a painful knowledge of the flaws of primogeniture.

In the eyes of the village and clan, Hinata was well aware that her father was considered a bastion of tradition, as benefited the leader of one of Konoha’s oldest clans. Certainly his demeanor and rhetoric pointed to this, but Hinata eventually realized that her father’s love of tradition was also a way to make his decisions unarguable with. He could bend tradition when expedient – her own betrothal and the resultant alliance with the Uchiha clan was a departure from the independence the Hyuga had prided itself on that was unmatched since the founding of Konoha – and have everyone admire his practicality and ability to use small changes to tip the scales of power. Instead though, improbably, he chose to believe in her.

In some ways, she had always known this. Why else would he have been so disappointed? Why else would his disappointment in her have cut so keenly? It had been the realization that her father (and she recognized then, her classmates, and Shisui and Itachi) had hoped she’d succeed, had been banking on it, and was waiting for her to take her rightful place that had finally freed her from the paralyzing diffidence that had crippled her all her life.

She was Hinata, heiress of the Hyuga clan, and denying that would cause even more undue harm, while accepting it was like the seeing the world with Byakugan eyes, clear and sharp, and limitless. She could finally look into Shisui’s eyes and not reject the image of herself she saw there, and could finally imagine a future where they (Shisui and Itachi, but also her) could rebuild their clans together.

\--

Shisui had accused Hinata of being a martyr, but she knew she wasn’t anything of the sort. She sacrificed comparatively little, sitting in her office in the Hokage’s tower. Like the other clan heads, for her the war with Kumo was reduced to missives, the steady stream of injured from the front, and the agonizing decisions of which of her relatives she would send off and know might not return.

In addition, Hinata couldn’t help but feel partly responsible. She had studied enough about the political atmosphere to know that war with Kumo was almost inevitable – economic competition for missions in an increasingly global market, the escalating arms race, and especially, the simmering resentment left over from previous conflicts would only build and build – but this particular war and these particular casualties and deprivations wasn’t.

Twelve years before, her father had bartered for time with his brother’s life. Her father had delayed Kumo’s counter strike against the Hyuga - but had also ensured that when it finally came, it would pull the Uchiha clan and all of Konoha into war. It didn’t matter how unworthy Hinata felt – in the face of that obligation, she knew who she had to be. Obito’s eyes won the last war. Hinata didn’t have the audacity to think that hers would do the same, but she was sending her sister, cousins, aunts, and uncles to die on the front lines, and she thought that if she could help relieve the pressure on them for a moment, it couldn’t even be counted a sacrifice.

The Byakugan was such simple thing really – some small genetic switches turned on fortuitously in her family, and human adaptability and ninja desperation did the rest. The human brain wasn’t meant to see 360 degrees at once and both see and see through an object simultaneously and make sense of it all. Still, generations of Hyuga children had been able to successfully rewire their brains without even being conscious of it.

There wasn’t time for the natural process to take place now, which was why Ino was in Hinata’s office.

“Hey Hinata. Are you ready?” Ino asked.

“Yes,” Hinata answered, and waited behind her desk.

The Yamanaka mindbending technique was similar in ways to the Hyuga’s own gentle fist. However, instead of feeding into the tenkutsu, Ino forced her way through the path of Hinata’s sensory nerves and followed them back to slide into the space behind her brain. It was a jangly feeling, a dissonant shiver running through her nerves, while her body sought to fight off the foreign invader. (Was this reaction because the Yamanaka’s chakra signature was so unlike the Hyuga’s? Or was this a little-used reflex against the danger of being taken over from the inside?)

A moment later, Hinata was herself again as though nothing had happened. Even though she knew Ino had been spying from inside her skull to see how Hinata saw the world and then had danced along her optic nerves to see the raw data to see how her eyes saw the world, Hinata couldn’t find any trace of Ino left inside her.

“You have really weird vision, do you know that?” said Ino, “But I think I have enough to make a crude map between your eyes and your brain.”

“How long will it take the genjutsu to be ready?” asked Hinata.

“Should be about a week,” said Ino.

Hinata nodded a dismissal and thought about all the things she needed to do with the time she had remaining. Ino, who was still as bright and cheerful and energetic as she was as a child, returned to her job of extracting information from captured ninjas.

The program to transplant the Byakugan eye was deemed sufficiently important to call Sakura back from the front lines to develop the protocol. Sakura groused about not being a neuro-ophthalmic surgeon, but Hinata could tell how eager she was to have a chance to do something novel and that might actually change the course of the war, something besides reattaching limbs and repairing gaping wounds. The village council had been pushing for it ever since Konoha started losing the war, but every time, she and Itachi had resisted. All ninja families were held together by each family’s own customs and history, but also by their techniques and the genetics that made those techniques more effective or even possible. To be Hyuga was to have the Byakugan, which was why there was no mention of the original mutation creating the Sharingan in her clan’s genealogies and why codified in the village laws when the Hyuga clan joined Konoha was the right for her grandfather to kidnap the infant son of a trader who had done business in Konoha two years before. Giving up the Byakugan was more than just risking family secrets in the hands of others. It was changing what made up the core identity of her clan, which is why risks aside, she had to be the first.

Hinata had been Hyuga head for only a few months when the war started, and over the past two years since, she rarely found opportunity to be just Hinata, and not the clan leader. She had played a desperate catch up to immerse herself in her responsibility as the Hyuga heiress since she was twelve, and while it was an established clan head’s prerogative to project an air of agreeableness, Hinata had to hold on to the reserve and dignity of her position like a shield. She couldn’t afford to be seen as a child still among her new peers, not in that time of war. Even her old classmates, who knew her and her weaknesses, were similarly taking up their allotted places, so that it was Nara Shikamaru she discussed strategies with and Aburame Shino coordinated his family’s scouts in the field, and all wielding their heritages as weapons to carve out positions of authority in the war.

Sakura was a genius in her own field. She also had changed from the girl she was at twelve, but that happened in times of necessity. However, it was the lack of distance and bland professionalism that pushed Hinata off kilter during her pre-operation visits. Perhaps it was a necessity on the front lines or perhaps it was because like Naruto and unlike the rest of her classmates, Sakura hadn’t had the fallback of legacy and political training to rely on and had to punch her own way through, but with Sakura, she was once again, just Hinata.

Sakura chattered while she measured the electrical responses of Hinata’s retinal cells. She’d say, “I really need to thank you again for volunteering for this, Hinata. I mean, I love my job but I’m so busy patching people up that I really don’t have a chance to get any research done. And I can’t help but feel like I’m just trying to hold back a dam. Like did I tell you about what happened the day before I came back here? There was this girl, about a couple years older than us, and she had gotten hit with a jutsu to the head so hard it cracked her skull. Honestly, I knew she was a goner, but I was just trying to keep her alive long enough for her old genin teammate to get there. He’d lost his other teammate less than a month ago, you know? It was terrible. He eventually did get there before she died, but in the meantime, every time she moved, her brain fluid was leaking out of her nose and skull, and it got everywhere. I burned the clothes I was wearing as soon as I was finished,” or talk about their luck that the eye was an immune privileged site and thus Hinata wouldn’t be saddled with immunosuppressants for the rest of her life or other such things. It was bizarre.

\--

The preparation was hard, but the aftermath of losing her eyes was harder. Itachi, who had endured his share of war when he was four and who found himself again in its midst when all he had wanted was peace, turned himself into Kumo in exchange for the life of his brother. Hinata found herself suddenly powerless to do anything. Politics was worthless, even for the Hyuga head and acting head of the Uchiha Clan - Kumo would never give up such a prize without an even more dear cost - and she’d given up her ability to be Hinata the ninja when she gave up her eyes. (She had given up the right to be Hinata the ninja when she was inaugurated, but holding on to the ability had been a comforting deception).

Shisui left to bring him back soon after, and the following months felt bleaker than the frozen winter landscape. Without the Byakugan, the world was dull and gray. Chakra let the ninja be superhuman and miracle workers, but without her sight and the brightly colored fires burning within those around her and even herself, it was hard to remember that and hold onto hope.

She wasn’t the only one to feel this way. The winter was harsh. Perhaps it was no harsher than normal, but food rationing and the strain of the past two years meant the seasonal flu burned through the population like a plague. By the end of the winter, in total, a fifth of the village’s population had died since the beginning of the war. Even the civilians, who had been largely shielded from direct casualties before, realized that Konoha wouldn’t survive another winter.

It was not like the last war with Iwa. Peace-loving Konoha had no love of conflict and readily agreed to a white peace and the pre war status quo when the war tilted in its favor, but even had Konoha lost, its further existence was never really in question. However, Kumo wanted to destroy Konoha and it was too late to sue for peace – Konoha would go the way of Uzushio, its survivors scattered and relying on the goodwill of others. Partially inspired by Hinata and Itachi’s own decisions, the village council decided that they couldn’t afford to hold anything back. That spring, it was decided, would be Konoha’s last stand.

It was in a way an admission that the Konoha experiment had failed. Sixty five years before, when the Uchiha and Senju founded Konoha, they asked the clans of Fire Country to join together with them to create a community and peace. They asked for loyalty not just to one’s own clan, but to one’s countrymen and exchanged in promise the ability to build a better future. Now, they sent their hope for the future generation to the battlefields, sent their beloved firstborn heirs to the front, sent the children not just of the Hyuga and the Uchiha, but from all of Konoha, with the aim not to survive but to make Kumo pay dearly for their lives. In one way, it was a return to the old days of ninja clans too busy scrabbling for their survival to build. In another, it was a relinquishing of a cherished delusion that even if Konoha fell, the clan would survive, and admitting that the clans could not afford any longer to hold back any part of themselves.

Konoha hollowed out. The civilians, the infirm, and the clan heads frantically coordinating the war effort were all that remained that spring. Nine year old Uchiha Saru had been the youngest killed in battle before Itachi’s loss, and his death had shaken all of the frontline fighters, but by the springtime, the village dissolved the Academy and sent the students to be fodder and fend as best they could on the front lines. Clan Sarutobi was wiped out. It was a terrible spring, damp, dreary and gray. The countryside around Konoha was bare save for weeds – the farmers had given up planting after the previous year yielded their fields trampled and burned down, the seed crop was eaten and gone, and there was little to do but flee to the shelter of distant relations or wait and endure.

Konoha’s last ditch rally worked. Kumo was weary too, the winters in the mountains of Lightning Country were harder than in low lying Fire Country, and they expected a Konoha broken and begging for surrender. In the reports Hinata received back from the battlefield, she glimpsed signs of Shisui - enemy messengers making careless mistakes and getting caught, spies outing themselves, outpost barricades with traps left unactivated, and small chance blunders that changed the outcomes of battles.

Kumo retreated and retreated, finally to its last fortified outpost, built long before the emergence of the Hidden Villages. Konoha prepared for a siege and whatever desperate ideas Kumo could throw out and hoped that Kumo wouldn’t be able to scrounge up the same miracle Konoha had, but amazingly, uncharacteristically, the Raikage sent up a white flag. Konoha’s envoy team was met with an apparent mass suicide of Kumo’s leaders, and Itachi was found sedated in a hospital lab.

A week later, Shisui’s body was recovered. Brain damage due to overuse explained Ino, who had seen enough of it to recognize the signs. When Hinata saw the body, it was as if the fire inside her that she had lost as the same time as her eyes reappeared. She was angry. Shisui had been angry when she told him about her plan to transplant her eyes. He’d been angry when she asked him to help translate the Byakugan sight to normal vision. He’d been angry after the operation. At the time, Hinata had been disappointed that he didn’t support her when she knew it had been necessary. They had never really discussed it, had never had a full blown argument about it. When faced with confrontation, Shisui preferred to run and Hinata to hide behind her training and polite reasonableness, and there was always the war to think about instead, and then Shisui was gone.

Itachi received the news of Shisui’s death with the same calmness she had seen in every part of her life, save the moment when Itachi had heard about Sasuke’s capture and left to bargain for him. She finally understood why Shisui would sometimes get so frustrated with Itachi. “Why aren’t you angry?” she asked, “Why wouldn’t he let either of us make sacrifices, but he could?”

“It is part of being a leader. He trusted that together, we could pick up the pieces and rebuild,” said Itachi, “Assume you are correct, and he was a hypocrite. Perhaps I was selfish to free my brother, and he was selfish to free me. Does it change anything?” Childishly, Hinata wanted to say that he didn’t understand, but of course, Itachi did. He had already lived through the aftermath of war once, and was living through it again and knew enough about how leadership was even more crucial now in this fragile peace than during the war to let himself be bogged down. Still, she cried then, and wrapped her arms around Itachi, while he stiffly sat on his bed, and she tried to remember the dream the three of them shared, about changing their clans and rebuilding them whole and pure.

\--

The wedding was held the spring after the war ended. The shoots of green that had been trampled into mud the previous year tentatively sprouted from the earth and Konoha tried its hardest to drive away the dreary ghost of the previous years with a riot of colors. The reds and greens and golds and the other rainbows of colors would have been tastelessly gaudy before the war, but were important now. Tribute from Kumo allowed Konoha to start recovering and project at least the façade of prosperity to its visiting dignitaries and potential future clients.

The original marriage contract between Hinata and Shisui had been voided with his death, but even had he not died, Itachi and she would have still rewritten it. Like all the Konoha clans, the Hyuga and Uchiha had suffered significant numerical depletion. This was dangerous for a bloodline clan. Genetics was a finicky thing, and the bloodline clans did not record meticulous genealogies for merely their own egos. Careful study went into determining how much out-breeding could take place without losing their crucial traits and how much inbreeding could occur without deformity, and the deaths of so many of her clan members disrupted that careful balance. A partial merger with the Uchiha clan was only practical. The Uchiha had branched off several hundreds of years before and in most ways, the Hyuga were no more related to them than they were to the Akimichi. Yet, the Sharingan shared some of the same crucial genes with the Byakugan, and thus those genes had been maintained in the Uchiha clan. Allelic exclusion would prevent codominance and a nonfunctional hybrid, while still maintaining the precious genes from both lineages within an individual’s germ line. That had been verified by the Godaime herself, over thirty years before. Hinata hoped it would be enough.

Hinata’s marriage to Itachi was equally practical. It was necessary as a symbol and to prove to their own families their dedication to such a radical change. In the precarious stage after the war, it was imperative that their clan members not fall back into the easy habits of following tradition in a time of uncertanty. Practicality was the reason she gave to the clan elders and the village council, and it was true. However, it was true too that she wanted to share her life with someone who had the same vision. At seven, though she hadn’t realized it at the time, her father had given her a great gift. He’d swallowed pride and threw in his lot with the suspect Uchiha clan because he recognized even then that Shisui was a rarity to be utilized. He knew Hinata would need someone with Shisui’s vision and desire for change as a partner, because the road to change was dishearteningly long. Without Shisui, Hinata wasn’t sure if she would have recognized that her one passion in life was to fix her clan.

Shisui was dead, but somehow when she was with Itachi, she could still see him hovering around them. Shisui was there in the memories she and Itachi shared with each other, and no one left alive. Shisui was there in their shared visions for their clans. After the wedding ceremony and celebration, they retreated to their new quarters, alone save for a ghost. And although Hinata had never really tried to pursue happiness, with Itachi, she thought she could find it nevertheless.


End file.
